


Decor

by executrix



Category: Firefly
Genre: BDSM, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-10
Updated: 2011-05-10
Packaged: 2017-10-19 05:58:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/197705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He tied a single strand of crimson embroidery floss around her ankle, [...] believing that if you know what you're doing, you don't need fire to burn deep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Decor

_If you read "embargo" backwards, you get "O grab me."_ Vladimir Nabokov, "Lectures on Literature"

 _If you fall, I will catch you. I will be waiting, time after time. __(Lauper & Hyman, "Time After Time")_

 _ _Verse_  
One school of decoration is minimalist: white walls, a plain low table with just one lovely bowl, a vase with just one stem._

Simon stood behind Inara, lacing up her satin corset. Its front was decorated with crossed ribbon ties: coals to Newcastle! The beautiful fabric made Simon a little sad, because it was exactly the shade of creamy white that he had his living-room ceiling painted only a month before he….left. He wouldn't have spent seventy-four credits a gallon for the paint if he'd known. Or, hell, maybe he would have had the rest of the apartment painted too. He never liked the wallpaper in the bathroom, and now his fading memories include wallpaper that irked him.

The laces were braided silk, strong as steel cables, so he could pull until she gasped and then knot the frame into place. First he rested his hands, warm and strong on her newly narrowed waist. Then he ran one hand along the upper edge of the corset, where the tops of her breasts had been pushed into slopes: soft unconstrained skin at the border of slippery satin. The other hand dipped beneath the corset, where frilled suspenders held up stockings that were translucent from some angles, nearly opaque from others, petrol green with a buried shimmer of gold. He put his thumb on the lacy elastic, and fanned out his fingers against the few inches of thigh revealed over the stocking top. Next to the white corset, her skin was honey or the gold of light toast. Next to the stockings' portable DIY moonless night, her skin was cream.

Inara felt buoyed up; lifted and towed to shore spread across her rescuer's body. She felt light enough to say what should never have been said. "I wish I weren't going to work…I wish that…"

"Then imagine that he is," Simon ordered.

And her poor client felt, for once, that he had been chosen, in the way her eyes praised his quite unremarkable body, in the grace with which she knelt to unlace his boots, the ardor with which she slipped against him, their pleasure that made him re-assess what he meant by "real" and "faked". He truly didn't know whether he should pay double the agreed price or should have sent her a bill himself. (In the end, he gave her a generous tip, to preserve the option of repeating this frighteningly magical experience. Inara used the extra money to take River on a shopping spree, knowing that it would please Simon.)

Inara also knew that Simon liked to undress her even more than he liked to watch her strip, and she knew that he usually stayed as close to dressed as feasible, punning on naked/closed. He liked to adjust the lighting, theatrically, and blindfold her so she could be seen leisurely and he couldn't.

At the beginning of their three-month contract, Simon gave Inara a bracelet. It was of no particular monetary value, a plainish cuff an inch or so wide. It was ugly, and the soft metal dented easily, but it was the kind that fastens with a small screwdriver and doesn't come off until the person with the screwdriver—in this case, of course, Simon—says that it does.

When the bracelet was locked in place, he told her to roll out the cheval mirror. She started to set it up near the bed, but he told her it didn't matter. Her black patent pumps were still on (another pun, as they mirrored the mirror). "Put your arms up—clasp your hands around the, the, things at the top," he said. "The finials," he said, obviously relieved to remember the word. "Good. Spread your legs farther. With your shoes outside the base of the mirror." First he held her and stroked her, all of her visible, he just visible as a ghost outside her lines. Then she heard a glissade of zipper and he pinned her wrists and there was nothing for her to see as her body kissed the cold slick glass and she had to trust that the mirror wouldn't tip over or careen around the room. And it didn't.

At the beginning of the second month, Simon gave her a pair of really awful cheap earrings that he bought in the bazaar. A cheap copper ear-wire dangled feathers with a poppy-like yellow blaze on a red center and a harsh green tail. Inara cringed at the thought of wearing them to an important engagement, where she would be widely Captured. They weren't just ugly in and of themselves, they clashed with her gown.

When she took the earrings from him, first he put his arm across her shoulders, like a yoke, pulling her lightly against him until she flowed back, tailoring her body to his. Her hair nearly submerged his white shirt cuff (which looked so plain against her mulberry silk, brocaded in bronze) until he twined his other hand into the forest of dark curls and bared her neck.

And every time she turned her head, the feathers brushed against her neck and made her think of lips that had brushed there, the teeth that had fastened and drew back just before her skin would have been marked, his tongue lapping, his mouth sucking at the channel beneath her ear. She could close her eyes and lean back and long for him to bruise her, knowing that he'd stop every time before he did.

Anyway, it all worked out for the best: a magazine praised her for her daring fashion statement, and a major couture house based a collection on a feather-and-shell theme.

At the beginning of the third month, he sat on the bed as she stood before him. He told her to put one foot on the edge of the bed (she wore black sandals, nothing much at all in the way of satin straps and a thin sole and stiletto heels). Her sea-green dressing gown parted. He tied a single strand of crimson embroidery floss around her ankle, calculating that it would fall apart in a week or so, and the visible stain would last a little longer before it washed off, believing that if you know what you're doing, you don't need fire to burn deep.

 _Reverse_  
When their new contract begins, Inara anticipates seeing Simon at her feet, sobbing her name. She anticipates no trouble in switching him. He pleased her by reassurance (even though she did suspect him of rehearsing his lines and writing them on his shirt cuff just to make sure). In a life that often resembled a promenade along a ridge as thin and icy as a skate blade, he gave her a chance to fall back and make snow angels in the air, or to dive in a triple-tuck and splash harmlessly into deep water.

She rather suspects that Simon has topped more often than his deepest dreams would suggest. Even when he is only a guest at a party, she imagines Simon bustling to make sure that everyone has a good time, whether this involves refreshing their drinks or their bruises. Topping up.

Yet another school of decoration is maximalist. When he serves her, there will be sharp things and ripped fabric and things that burn. There will be edges, and he will go over them. He will bow his shoulders and bend his neck for the yoke, but only once he demonstrates to her that he should. Because, she thinks, a room filled with objects (wax flowers and birds under glass domes; silken fringes; a piano lid covered with silver-framed photographs) is…interesting. As long as you take the time and trouble to take care of all of them.


End file.
